Top 6 Things to Demand from Disaster Recovery as a Service

It’s 2018 and time to really get serious about disaster recovery. Just look around—coordinated and sophisticated cyberattacks, the remarkable rise of ransomware, the avalanche of climate-related natural disasters. The risks seem to be increasing exponentially. So does the potential cost. Since the beginning of the decade, the cost of downtime has increased by nearly 40%. More than 80% of companies say an hour of downtime costs over $300,000; a third of larger companies say an hour of downtime costs between $1 million and more than $5 million.

Despite the risks right in front of us, far too many companies either completely lack a disaster recovery strategy or have a solution that is unproven, underfunded or untested.

Why has disaster recovery fallen down the list of IT priorities? Typical reasons center around costs and complexity. Traditional DR processes require dedicated secondary sites that are costly to deploy and maintain. In addition, they involve manual processes that are time-consuming to implement, test and execute.

The good news is that those reasons are no longer valid. In disaster recovery, the cloud changes everything. With the right disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution, IT can simplify deployment and operations, leverage cloud economics and improve recovery point objectives (RPO). Here are the top six things to demand from a cloud DRaaS solution.

Accelerate time to protection: With the right solution, you can have a fully functional, end-to-end DR deployment up and running in less than a day—with no need to build a secondary DR site.

Apply cloud economics: Reduce secondary site management costs with cloud-managed infrastructure and only pay for what you use with granular, on-demand cloud pricing. Budget more accurately using an Opex model.

Maximize your resources: Use technologies and tools your IT teams already know to manage cloud-based resources, without the difficulties involved in learning new platforms, hiring new specialists or utilizing new tools.

Improve performance: Achieve robust protection with RPOs of five minutes or less, while leveraging virtual machine protection on demand and protecting multi-VM applications in less than a minute.

Leverage proven solutions: By working with trusted and proven suppliers, you can implement modern cloud-based features and capabilities designed specifically for virtual environments.

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Taking the next stepVMware has introduced a DRaaS solution, called VMware Site Recovery™, that meets all the above criteria and more. The solution is an add-on service to VMware Cloud on AWS and built on proven technologies: VMware Site Recovery Manager and VMware vSphere Replication. The service relies on modern, software-defined solutions such as VMware vSAN to provide robust storage for the disaster recovery site.

VMware Site Recovery simplifies traditional disaster recovery operations by enabling DR-in-a-day implementation. The on-demand site protection service uses a common, vSphere-based operating environment from on premises to the cloud. The service protects workloads between on-premises data centers and VMware Cloud on AWS, as well as between different instances of VMware Cloud on AWS.

ConclusionAre you finally ready to get really serious about disaster recovery? Now is the time. The stakes have never been higher, and the solutions have never been easier. Whether you want to complement existing DR strategies or completely exit the secondary data center business, VMware provides a path to a safer and more secure future. Please visit VMware here to learn more about VMware Site Recovery.